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Did the Media Create Trump?

Just a month after Donald Trump announced his run for president, people were already blaming “the media” for creating his candidacy. That theme has been sounded again and again, by NBC News, which claimed last summer that TV news’ blanket coverage of his campaign was “fueling” it, the Wall Street Journal, which early on charted the saturation coverage cable news was affording him, Slate, which in late fall called him a product of “conservative media,” and Salon, which has published at leastthreepieces on the topic of media culpability.

In recent weeks, Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi has placed the Trump onus on the media for covering the campaign as “a badly acted, billion-dollar TV show”; Vox has scolded the media for the clicks and kicks they provide to readers; and CBS President and CEO Leslie Moonves validated the idea that the media have an incentive to promote Trump by openly delighting in the ad money and “fun” the Trump campaign has brought to his network. “It’s a terrible thing to say. But, bring it on, Donald. Keep going,” Moonves said this week at a conference.

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All this damnation is actually flattering to the media, when you think about it. Most journalists hold a low view of how much influence and sway they have over the world they write about. Whether exposing wrongdoing by corporations and government in multi-part investigative series or championing an underappreciated novel, play or painting on the arts pages, they’re generally disappointed in the lackluster response by the public. You’re more likely to hear them say, “I have so little influence” than “Who am I going to crown president today?”

Alas, for all their power, the media did not create Donald Trump. Prior to campaign 2016, he already existed as a cultural force, enjoying greater name recognition than any other Republican candidate. Nobody can deny that Trump has shrewdly gamed the media for maximum exposure. But Trump’s skills at attracting publicity do not make a very good paternity case against the media. News outlets covered him for a variety of reasons, his availability being one of them, and his penchant for the outrageous and nonconventional another. If you want to blame anybody, blame the public. Had the public not responded to the Trump phenomenon, he would have quickly been relegated to the undercard debates and dispatched to the potter’s field of failed presidential candidates.

Let’s imagine for a second that I’m wrong. Maybe the media did create his candidacy and force it on the public. Is such a Pygmalion-like operation even possible? If you were in charge of the media conspiracy to create somebody like Trump, could you do it? First, you would need the proper vessel into which you could pour your plot. But if the creation is going to be a group effort, how would you get all the competing media elements to agree on The One candidate? If a candidate-promoting media cabal existed, it would be inherently unstable, prone to fracture as the cabal members vied for dominance over the others. Indeed, the larger the cabal working to promote a single candidate, the greater the incentive for one member to peel off and undermine the candidate. Besides, I see no evidence in campaign 2016 of coordination among media entities. Not even Fox News Channel appears to have picked a favorite. Instead of trying to create Donald Trump, the media seem to have almost unified in an attempt to destroy him.

Finally, if the media cabal could hold together long enough to create a candidate, wouldn’t it gravitate toward a centrist, No Labels type that it could manage and not somebody like Donald Trump, who despises the media and seeks their subservience and destruction? Obviously, a President Trump would be a better story than aPresident Milquetoast, but self-interest would preclude the unified media from backing a junior dictator-type like Trump. You create things to control them, not to be controlled by them.

So, if the media can’t create a successful candidate deliberately, could they do so by accident? That’s closer to what media critics above are alleging about Trump: By giving bounteous attention to Trump, the most charismatic and controversial candidate, the media cast shadows of neglect on the others, and the ensuing feedback loop brings still more attention to the charismatic and controversial candidate until the other candidates wither and die from Vitamin D deficiency.

The problem with this Accidental Creation Theory is most of the attention directed toward Trump has been negative, speaking to his personal weaknesses, his professional weaknesses and his policy weaknesses. There’s nothing the media like better than a weak but popular candidate because he provides the grist for endless critical stories, creating a competitive environment in which rivals search for even more critical stories. Few political reporters spend much shoe leather on exposing all the good things a candidate has done in his career. Journalists are more like sharks than packs of running dogs: Their instinct is to swarm and destroy, not just sharpen their teeth on a chew toy. While it’s true that Trump has run the gauntlet of TV news relatively unscathed, this speaks more to his evasive skills when asked tough questions than it does of media timidity. NBC News’ Chuck Todd, CNN’s Jake Tapper, CBS News’ John Dickerson and others have given the candidate their best shots. But the idea that a hard-hitting cable news host can take down a demagogue is a fantasy that exists only in the dramatic works of Aaron Sorkin.

The Accidental Creation Theory also denies Trump any agency in the creation of his successful candidacy. When people complain about all the “free TV” exposure Trump has acquired (an estimated $23.4 million as of mid-December), they neglect to mention that all this free media doesn’t come in a void. Trump’s written a dozen best-selling books since 1987, including a 2000 volume (The America We Deserve) on what his presidency would look like. He’s been a regular donor to other political campaigns, further driving up his political profile. He’s also a proven TV commodity because he understands the medium’s grammar, having studied it on his own reality series The Apprentice. At great risk of failure, he’s run an unconventional campaign, espousing a number of non-Republican mainstream positions, differentiating his candidacy from the other, more orthodox Republicans. He’s disarmed the media by acknowledging that he’s a greedy man full of self-contradiction, and he has inspired voters with his positive and entertaining campaign. Trump also makes himself readily available to journalists for interviews, even when no camera is running. Remember, this is a man who got blanket publicity in 2007 when he announced he was going into the frozen meat business with Trump Steaks. Publicity ain’t free if you’re working for it! Maybe the other candidates should have worked as hard as Trump did.Perhaps an ideological force in the media conspired to create Trump to discredit Republicans. No less a Republican power than Jeb Bush tweeted his support of the conspiracy theory, advanced by conservatives, that the Trump candidacy was designed by liberals (and by extension, liberal media) to wound the Republican Party and get Hillary Clinton elected. The problem with the liberal creation theory is that none of leading liberal commenters—David Remnick, Ruth Marcus, Frank Bruni, et al.—appear to have received the “promote Trump” memo. They’ve all been dismissive of his candidacy. Plus, liberals aren’t smart enough to run such an operation, and conservatives aren’t so stupid they would fail to counter it.

The left would like you to think that the right-wing media bear all responsibility for the Trump phenomemon. Some thinkers blame Trump’s excesses on Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Breitbart, et al. for unleashing the populist passions that have fed Trump. But blaming the entire right is a bum rap. For example, a special issue of National Review in January declared war on him.

Then there is the passive complaint: “You guys in the media haven’t held Trump accountable, thereby allowing him to create himself. This gripe has no merit, either. Everybody — from the New York Times, to Bloomberg News, to Politico, to the Washington Post, to the partisan press, to all of the fact-checking operations — has given it to Trump about his business dealings, his propensity for making things up and saying crazy things. Although the media have surely benefited from Trump’s popularity, they have no solid investment in seeing him succeed. As my colleague Hadas Gold noted yesterday, news outlets across the ideological spectrum have insisted ever since Trump announced that he had no chance of winning his party’s nomination, let alone the November election.

If you were a conventional media observer, you might say that the Trump candidacy demonstrates not the power of the press, but—overwhelmingly, and to our chagrin—its relative powerlessness. But maybe that’s just what we want you to think. I knot myself up as I write this next hypothetical: Could it possibly be that the media actually did create Trump as a political force, but did so by screaming over and over that he couldn’t possibly win?